1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for automatically generating a program by selecting necessary program modules from among program modules that are prepared in advance and by adequately combining the selected program modules.
2. Description of the Related Art
Composing software programs often requires a great many manpowers. Therefore, various techniques have been proposed for generating a desired program used in a specific field by modularizing in advance program fragments to be used in that field, selecting necessary modules from among the program modules and combining the selected modules.
In one of these techniques, the prepared software modules are represented as boxes on a display screen. The boxes are selected and connected to each other so as to form a flowchart in an interactive manner.
In this method, although a user need not code a program, he must input a flowchart, and he is still required to know which modules should be selected and how the selected modules should be combined. Namely, without knowledge as to functions of each of the modules, knowledge as to ordinal relationship among the modules, and knowledge as to influence of one on another, programs that correctly operate as desired cannot be composed. For this reason, the conventional automatic program generation techniques have not been convenient to users.